by Thomas Stubbs

Forty years from now this might seem almost normal...

You're late. As you blast out of your jetport and head for work at MicroSunAdobe.Oracle, where you write holographic help documentation, you think about the three-and-a-half hours of meetings you have before lunch. Lunch! You realize you left your lunch ... on the kitchen table! Your whole day is starting to remind you of the Seattle earthquake disaster of 2023.

You activate your telepathic chip implant so you can send a thought message to Theodore, your faithful Basset Hound (by this time, tremendous advances in genetics and intelligence-enhancing drugs have enabled most dogs to earn college degrees--via the Web, of course).

"Theodore, I know you're on the Cybercouch watching 3-D holographic cat movies, but I have an emergency! I left my lunch on the kitchen table! Can you get it and transport it to my office right away"

Theodore lumbers from his cozy couch and waddles across the room to get the brown bag. Minutes later his pudgy paw enters the coordinates into the control panel. In just a few seconds the beeper on the transporter indicates your package has reached its destination.

Far-fetched fiction? Well, anyone who owns a dog will see the impossibility of this ever happening (they know that the bag will arrive at the office transporter in shreds, each wrapper carefully chewed to extract all traces of edible substance).

Imagine the benefits of being able to transmit technical documentation across the airwaves, or even telephone lines. You could write a user's manual or a special project update and send it to users all over the country in a matter of a few hours. Is this a real possibility? Perhaps not with a transporter, which hasn't been invented yet, but a new printing service bureau called NowDocs.com can almost do the same thing--as long as the subject is printed business documentation.

NowDocs.com is a Web-based remote printing and binding service with offices in more than a dozen cities. You upload your document in one of the many formats to their online servers. They will print the document, bind it according to your specifications, and hand-deliver it to your client in as little as two hours.

The NowDocs.com Web site has an excellent graphic depicting the entire document delivery process in six steps. Each of the steps links to a detailed page explaining that part of the process, using excellent low-resolution (quick-loading!) graphics.

Fig. 1: NowDocs process diagram, from their web site.